Going Against the Grain

The ReBuilding Exchange, one of my places of employment, has a DIY fest, called Going Against the Grain, every year.  This past Sunday, a laundry list of hands-on crafters, improvisers, builders, and designers descended on the warehouse, fueled by the folks at New Belgium brewers.  So, like the good little green citizens that we are, we biked over a little after noon, skies threatening overhead.

The amount of bikes there was kind of out of control.

The lady and I, and some good friends, gathered much information on our nascent, studio-apartment-sized experiments in homesteading, home-brewing, bread baking, furniture building, and food growing.  Unfortunately, we don't have room for chickens just yet, but all in due time . . .


Right as we walked in, there was a badass rickshaw contraption by Alex Gartelmann and Jonas Sebura.  

Puts a regular 'ol Harley to shame.

The Neuroticism of Craft

Last year, I designed and built a series of six chairs from road signs, all nearly identical.  The chair shells were folded aluminum signs and the bases were made from good 'ol Alabama pecan wood, milled, sanded, and lacquered within an inch of their life.  They turned out pretty well. I wrote an article about them, got paid, and enjoyed them for about a week.  Then, one day after work, I sat down in one of them, and the two joints in the back legs blew out.  The chair collapsed.  I smacked my elbow and my head pretty hard on the way to the floor.


Time passed.  The rest of the chairs seemed fine, more or less; the broken one had a flawed joint in the back, which gave way once my weight was leaned back into the seat.  However, I was nervous every time I sat in one from there on out, and especially nervous that someone else, perhaps bigger than me, might sit in one and break it.  I'm fine with breaking my own creations, but the paranoia and anxiety and embarrassment around the idea of someone else possibly injuring themselves and thinking I was a moron was almost too much to handle.  


I had broken a cardinal rule of design -- putting form above function.  In my desire to have a sleek, light form, I had ignored some structural considerations.  The back legs were extremely slanted -- over 20 degrees.  That joint, where the cross-piece intersected, bit too deeply into those back legs, weakening the wood there.  The legs splayed in only one axis -- front-to-back -- which made the chair unstable side-to-side.  The stock for the legs, at 1" square, was not strong enough to resist the twist and tension in the folded aluminum signs, which meant the legs didn't all hit the ground evenly once the base was bolted to the sign.  The 3/4" dowels I used as cross pieces were also not strong enough to resist side-to-side motion.  The base was essentially a series of parallelograms, with no triangulation, which led to a lack of stiffness.

The original chairs, pretty as you please.

Hattery Labs

After months of anticipation, the folks of Hattery Labs have moved into their space.  I had to leave at the beginning of February, but my friend Chris Currie carried on, finishing up the assembly, sanding, oiling, and waxing of the last few tables.  He is a consumate professional, and his work speaks for itself.  


The last day I was there, we put together the final conference table, a 14' long beast that managed, somehow, to still look fairly sleek relative to its enormous size.  I was also excited to see a 200+ pound table top supported on four slender wood legs, with no connecting tensile structure at the feet.  You can design all you want, but every time I flip over a table or a chair for the first time and see how it sits my heart leaps into my throat a little bit; design becomes real, and your reputation and ideas hit reality in one concrete moment.  I've had that moment turn into splintered wood and clenched fists; fortunately, this time, it turned into high fives and raised beers.  


What follows is some final photos of the work, and an illustrated journal of the final assembly of the conference tables, following progress posts here and here and here.  Much thanks to Mark Wills, Josh To, and all the folks at Hattery Labs, as well as Chris Currie and Jamie Sartory -- it was a helluva lot of fun.  And the tables turned out ok.

Mark Wills at work, photo by James Buyayo.

Material Witness

Last week, I spent two days processing some old wood.  So it goes; de-nailing, tar-scraping, jointing, and re-sawing are all part and parcel of using old lumber, be it architectural salvage or alley finds.  I've worked with a lot of old-growth wood, which is embedded with history.  The trees themselves began life maybe fifty years before they were cut down, and then were used to construct buildings that stood a hundred years more.  By the time I come into contact with that wood, touch it, cut it, plane it, taste its dust hanging in the afternoon air, I am knifing through almost geologic layers of time.  Those trees were teenagers in some Michigan forest as Abraham Lincoln dropped the Gettysburg Address on freshly bloodied ground in Pennsylvania.


This time, the wood I was milling was different -- it was redwood.  That name sparks up a whole chain of associations, images of clear-cut hillsides, logging protests, and dim, fog-spooked forests.  Now endangered, redwood is rarely logged.  They are difficult to grow from seed, take an enormous amount of time to mature, and need a perfect storm of ecological conditions to prosper.  Once going, however, the giants are unstoppable, growing to unimaginable proportions and capable of living hundreds of years.  


After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, fire-suppression technology became very important.  A fast-growing, mostly wood-framed city, Chicago was devastated by a lack of fire-fighting infrastructure.  New building codes mandated the installation of water tanks on roofs, allowing for a large, gravity-pressurized water supply for each building.  Tanks were built from then-abundant West Coast redwood and Gulf Coast cypress, two highly rot-resistant, spongy woods that made tight, leakproof tanks once the wood fibers swelled with water.  Redwood and cypress are also not good for much else, as their grain makes them unsuitable for structural applications.

Drawing for a railroad water tank in Chicago, circa 1937, similar in design and construction to the rooftop towers.  Courtesy of Cyberspace World Railroad.

Pallets

A week before Christmas, I fell into conversation with an old Polish scrapper at the ReBuilding Exchange.  He had an epic beard (one that may have supported a small ecosystem of bacteria and woodland creatures) and a slight accent from his boyhood in Eastern Europe.  He and his brother were there to pick up pallets, which they would then strap to the roof of his biodiesel Mercedes wagon and sell.  Small -- 36" x 36" or so -- go for a dollar each, while large -- 36" x 48" -- go for a solid two-fifty.  


It seems like small cash, and it is.  You have to collect a helluva a lot of pallets to turn a profit.  But, as my Polish friend discovered, if you can drive costs down, and find an efficient pick-up route, the economics creep into the black.  By using vegetable oil in his car, he's eliminated the biggest cost, fuel.  By finding an efficient route, he's cut man-hours to the bone.  I saw him again last week, prowling my neighborhood for promising construction dumpsters.  The car was rattling within an inch of its life, throwing up a stream of french-fry scented exhaust.

A pallet recycling yard near my work, at Hoyne and Grand.

Open Source Ecology

A couple of days ago, I caught a story on NPR about Open Source Ecology, an initiative begun by a young astrophysicist, Marcin Jakuboski.  As he explains in his TED Talk, he found himself, at the end of his twenties, book-smart and real-world useless.  Searching for something more tangible to do with his life, he tried to go back to the land, becoming a farmer in rural Missouri.  He found his plans stymied again by unreliable machinery.  As he tells it, Marcin was then inspired to build his own tractor, using a "simple X, Y, Z geometry" and an interchangeable, de-mountable hydraulic power plant.  

The LifeTrac, the first project in the Global Village Construction Set.

This led to a wiki, which led to global collaboration, which spiraled into a project that hopes to open-source fifty industrial machines essential to humanity.  Jakuboski calls it a "civilization starter kit."  As the idea snowballed, he became a TED fellow and has now turned his property, the Factor E Farm, into a laboratory for prototyping these machines.  As of this fall, employees and volunteers are hard at work building an compacted earth-brick and strawbale lab and dormitory where designers, engineers, and builders will live and work on the GVCS.  The structures on the farm are being built with the GVCS brick press, the soil pulverizer, and the LifeTrac tractor, directly testing prototypes as they are created.  

The Global Village Construction Set, via Wikipedia. 

Winter Biking

It's been cold out.  

Chicago has had a relatively mild winter, especially compared to last year, but, coming from Alabama, it has been harsh enough to me.  The last two years, I lived in a place where it rarely dipped below freezing, frost was rare, and it never snowed.  This year, I managed to escape to San Francisco during the worst month of winter, but came back to some snow and damp cold.  We've had a number of days over forty, even flirting with fifty, but wind and clouds and the lake distill the chill into the bones.  

Through it all, I've struggled to keep biking.  I have two jobs; three days a week at the ReBuild Foundation, about five miles from home, and two days a week at ReBuilding Exchange, about a mile and a half from my apartment.  Both require a good bit of physical work, and topping the day off with a bike ride can take the last bit of energy out of me.  However, it is faster, more satisfying, and reasonably better for the environment for me to ride the bike instead of fight through traffic in the 'rolla.  

In a nod to the weather, I did pick up some new gear back in November.  I got a neoprene face mask, good for robbing banks in a pinch; neoprene gloves, warm and waterproof but also clammy and weird; and a thin merino-wool hat that fits under the helmet.  The hat and face mask are key, because the sub-freezing wind will drill into your brain, creating an ice-cream-headache-like effect that can be quite distracting.  For Christmas, I got a sweet hoodie -- it appears to be plain cotton, but the fibers are treated somehow, so water beads up on the surface.  This has been fantastic on the bike, as it blocks the wind and damp while staying breathable.  Lastly, glasses of some kind are essential, be it sunglasses or goggles, to keep the wind out of the eyes -- it dries out my contact lenses and makes them prone to blinking out, which is dangerous.  

Geared up!